Table Of ContentANARCHISM/MINARCHISM
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Anarchism/Minarchism
Is a Government Part of a Free Country?
Edited by
RODERICK T. LONG
Auburn University, USA
TIBOR R. MACHAN
Chapman University, USA
© Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan 2008
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan have asserted their moral right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.
Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
Gower House Suite 420
Croft Road 101 Cherry Street
Aldershot Burlington, VT 05401-4405
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Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a free country?
1. Political science – Philosophy. 2. Anarchism. 3. Libertarianism. I. Long, Roderick T.
II. Machan, Tibor R.
320.1’1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Anarchism/minarchism : is a government part of a free country? / [edited by]
Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Anarchism. 2.Comparative government. 3. Legitimacy of governments.
I. Long, Roderick T. II. Machan, Tibor R.
HX833.A56943 2007
320.5’7–dc22 2007007971
ISBN 978-0-7546-6066-8
This volume has been printed on acid-free paper
Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall,.
Contents
Preface
Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan vii
Notes on Contributors ix
PART 1: MINARCHISM
1 Why the State Needs a Justification
Lester H. Hunt 3
2 Libertarianism, Limited Government and Anarchy
John Roger Lee 15
3 Rationality, History, and Inductive Politics
Adam Reed 21
4 Objectivism against Anarchy
William R Thomas 39
5 Reconciling Anarchism and Minarchism
Tibor R. Machan 59
PART 2: ANARCHISM
6 Radical Freedom and Social Living
Aeon James Skoble 87
7 The State: From Minarchy to Anarchy
Jan Narveson 103
8 The Obviousness of Anarchy
John Hasnas 111
9 Market Anarchism as Constitutionalism
Roderick T. Long 133
10 Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism
Charles Johnson 155
Index 189
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Preface
Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan
Libertarians seek a society in which people are free to do as they please with their
own lives and peacefully acquired property, so long as they do not interfere with the
right of others to do likewise with theirs. In such a society, much that governments
currently do—all the myriad forms of forcible interference with their citizens’ lives
and property—would be abolished. But what would or should remain?
One libertarian tradition, drawing inspiration from classical liberal thinkers
like John Locke, Adam Smith, Frédéric Bastiat, and the American Founders—
and represented in the past century by, among others, Ludwig von Mises, Isabel
Paterson, Ayn Rand, and Robert Nozick—calls for a constitutional government of
strictly limited powers, which would be confined to the protection of everyone’s
negative (libertarian) rights. This position has come to be known as minarchism, the
advocacy of minimal government. (Although some proponents and opponents of
this position describe the government as “the state,” arguably this latter term carries
some baggage no libertarians wish to defend, given its use by such thinkers as Hegel
and Marx who meant by it something like an organic society.)
Another libertarian tradition—inaugurated in 1849 by the Belgian economist
Gustave de Molinari, further developed in the 1880s by the American journalist
Benjamin Tucker and the circle of writers associated with his periodical Liberty, and
represented more recently by Murray Rothbard, Morris and Linda Tannehill, David
Friedman (son of economist Milton Friedman), Bruce Benson, Randy Barnett, and
Hans-Hermann Hoppe, among others—proposes entirely abolishing government, in
the Weberian sense of an institution holding a legal monopoly over a given territory,
and replacing it with multiple providers of protection services competing on a free
market. This position is generally known as market anarchism or anarcho-capitalism,
to distinguish it from those forms of anarchism that oppose private property and
the market. (“Market anarchism” is arguably a less controversial designation than
“anarcho-capitalism,” since libertarians disagree amongst themselves as to whether
the term “capitalism” should be used to mean the unregulated free market that
libertarians favor, or the pro-corporate regulatory regime that they oppose.) Outside
of libertarian circles, the market anarchist position is best known via Robert Nozick’s
critique of it in his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia; ironically, academics
unfamiliar with the libertarian tradition often assume (despite Nozick’s footnotes)
that the idea of competing protection agencies was Nozick’s invention.
The purpose of the present volume is to examine the respective merits of
minarchism and market anarchism from the perspective of several contemporary
libertarian philosophers. The volume has been divided into minarchist and anarchist
sections for the reader’s convenience, although the nuances of particular contributors’
arguments are such that some papers do not fit neatly into one category rather than
another.
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Notes on Contributors
John Hasnas is an associate professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough
School of Business, where he teaches courses in ethics and law. He is a Senior
Research Fellow at the Cato Institute and an associated member of the Kennedy
Institute of Ethics. Professor Hasnas has held previous appointments as an Associate
Professor of Law at George Mason University School of Law, Visiting Associate
Professor of Law at the Washington College of Law at American University, and
Law and Humanities Fellow at Temple University School of Law. He has also
been a visiting scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics in Washington, DC and
the Social Philosophy and Policy Center in Bowling Green, Ohio. He received his
B.A. in Philosophy from Lafayette College, his J.D. and Ph.D. in Legal Philosophy
from Duke University, and his LL.M. in Legal Education from Temple Law School.
Between 1997 and 1999, Professor Hasnas served as assistant general counsel to
Koch Industries, Inc. in Wichita, Kansas. His scholarship concerns ethics and white
collar crime, jurisprudence, and legal history and his book Trapped: When Acting
Ethically is Against the Law is currently available from the Cato Institute.
Lester H. Hunt is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
He has taught at Carnegie-Mellon University, University of Pittsburgh, and The
Johns Hopkins University. He has written extensively on ethics, aesthetics, political
philosophy, and the philosophy of law, and is the author of Nietzsche and the Origins
of Virtue (1990) and Character and Culture (1998). He is currently working on a
book on anarchy and justification of the state.
Charles W. Johnson lives and works in Las Vegas, Nevada. He is an alumnus of
Auburn University, a Research Fellow for the Molinari Institute, and a member of
the Industrial Workers of the World IU 640. He writes and maintains the Rad Geek
People’s Daily at <http://radgeek.com/>, and can be reached through his personal
website at <http://charleswjohnson.name/>.
John Roger Lee (B.A., M.A. SUNY, Albany) (Ph.D. University of Southern
California) is a retired professor of philosophy who taught at institutions in the
State University of New York, the California State University, and the University
of California systems. He lives in Los Angeles, California where he writes on
philosophy and on political theory.
Roderick T. Long, B.A. (Harvard), Ph.D. (Cornell), is Associate Professor of
Philosophy at Auburn University; President of the Molinari Institute and Molinari
Society; editor of the Journal of Libertarian Studies; co-editor of the Journal of
Ayn Rand Studies and The Industrial Radical; Senior Scholar of the Ludwig von
Mises Institute; and author of Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Rand (Objectivist
